Presumably some of the elderly members of the audience had no idea what the speaker was getting at when the subject of Vaseline came up in his talk on M K Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach. They, after all, belonged to a time when Vaseline was still associated with skin care rather than as a means of facilitating homosexual intercourse. Other audience members must have squirmed a bit though; I know, I did. After an erudite discourse on the high idealism, striving for spiritual elevation and shared devotion to combating injustice that characterised the friendship between the two men, it was more than a little jarring to be confronted with the bare mechanics of what, in less enlightened times, was referred to as “buggery”.

To put everyone in the picture, in 2011 the writer Joseph Lelyfeld provoked a bitter controversy when passages in his new book on Gandhi (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India) were interpreted by some reviewers as inferring that he and the German-Jewish architect Herman Kallenbach were lovers during the time they lived together in Johannesburg. Such inferences were derived from certain letters Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach, in which he commented among other things that Vaseline and cotton wool were a “constant reminder” of him. Further meaning has been read into the practice of the two men of referring to one another in their correspondence as “Upper House” (Gandhi) and “Lower House” (Kallenbach). Lelyveld himself has rejected the gay interpretation of his work, saying that it did not say that Gandhi was bisexual or homosexual, but rather that he was celibate and deeply attached to Kallenbach. Even so, Great Soul has been banned in parts of India, and it continues, rightly or wrongly, to be primarily associated with an attempt at “outing” the Mahatma.

The speaker at the above-mentioned event, Israeli author (of Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Herman Kallenbach) and researcher Shimon Lev, debunked the homosexuality theory. Even prior to meeting Kallenbach, Gandhi had adopted a regime of strict celibacy and persuaded his friend to do likewise. Writing to his brother, Kallenbach confirmed that he had given up what had been an active heterosexual sex life (years later, he had at least one extended heterosexual affair, although he never married). The two men lived lives of the strictest ascetism, following a simple vegetarian diet, doing every menial physical chore themselves and in general limiting physical comforts to the barest necessities. So far as the “Vaseline” reference goes, this simply referred to how they treated the corns they developed through walking for many miles each day to their offices. (Gandhi once tried to persuade Kallenbach to burn his car. In the end, he simply left it unused in the garage for a year and then sold it. When the two men lived on Tolstoy Farm, they would walk twenty kilometres each day into the centre of town).

As for the terms “Upper House” and “Lower House”, Kallenbach was referred to by the latter because, like the Lower House in the British Parliament, he controlled the financial side of things, not just in their home set-up but in his largely bankrolling the entire Satyagraha (Indian Passive Resistance) movement. In Gandhi’s case, “Upper House” indicated the dominant role he had in determining the spiritual and philosophical development of the two men. Accounting for the terms even more simply, in the house they shared in Orchards, Johannesburg, Gandhi slept in a loft while Kallenbach slept on the floor below. So much for “Upper” and “Lower” being code words for active and passive sodomy. That people’s thoughts so readily stray in that direction nowadays probably says more about the times we live in than in this aspect of the Gandhi-Kallenbach relationship. Here, a white Jew and an Indian Hindu were able to transcend the formidable barriers of race, culture and religion to establish a remarkable personal bond, one characterised by a joint striving to live lives of the highest idealism. Today, it is all reduced to grubby speculation over who inserted what and where.

Some might ask why it is necessary to disprove the homosexuality theory, since even if there was a sexual component to the relationship that would hardly be antithetical to modern, liberal sensibilities. To that, there is at least one persuasive answer, namely that if there was a sexual relationship between the two men, then they were hypocrites and frauds since both claimed to be celibate. This inference would be bad enough if made solely against Kallenbach, a genuinely noble personality who devoted much of his life to fighting racial injustice in this country. It would be even worse if applied to Gandhi, someone who for all his undoubted eccentricities was undoubtedly one of history’s greatest leaders and thinkers who continues to inspire millions the world over.

Given that fallout over the trial of Oscar Wilde would have barely been over … the Ballad of Reading Jail was still a towering contribution to the evolution of World literature; and would have been circulating in the effervescent hotbed that was emerging Johannesburg, in its immediate self-governing colony stages- it would be inevitable that any such relationship as is implied in this strange blog would have been uber-secret.

Thus, any hint of homosexual behaviour would have been an excuse for the police/et al wiping Ghandhi off the map .. reduced ultimately to a penniless pauper’s funeral…the way Wilde was.

Additionally the local Indian community was incensed at his behaviour over the re-introduction of the Indian Pass laws provision in the Transvaal: agreed between Ghandi and Smuts.

So there would have been any number of people searching for an “illicit” connection. Apparently none were ever found.

At the same time since this particular human activity has apparently been around longer than vaseline has it is hard to imagine that its alleged advantages to facilitate what is surely a most disagreeable activity had passed those practitioners by.

In closing, i don’t buy the argument presented in the final paragraph and frankly don’t care … Ghandhi was a person of his time: he only became ‘omnipotent’ later… What he stood for when he was ‘ordinary’, is what matters not whatever he may or may not have had to hide from others.

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David Saks has worked for the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) since April 1997, and is currently its associate director. Over the years, he has written extensively on aspects of South African history, Judaism and the Middle East for local and international newspapers and journals.
David has an MA in history from Rhodes University. Prior to joining the SAJBD, he was curator -- history at MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg. He is editor of the journal Jewish Affairs, appears regularly on local radio discussing Jewish and Middle East subjects and is a contributor to various Jewish publications.